Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

two witnesses: Joseph Lawende, a salesman, and Joseph Hyam Levy, a butcher. Their evidence was that at 1.33 or 1.34 they saw a man and woman talking together at the entrance to Church Passage, which led to Mitre Square. However, since neither witness could identify Eddowes, or provide the police with a description of her, their alleged sighting is inconclusive and it might not have been her. However, if it was Eddowes they saw, it would not have been surprising that Lizzie Williams was nowhere to be seen; just as in the case of Annie Chapman, who had walked on a little way alone in Hanbury Street to meet a man, so Catherine Eddowes may have acted in the same manner. Both women would have been known to many clients in the neighbourhood whom they would not wish to turn away.
    We believe that when the two eyewitnesses had gone, the man Eddowes had spoken to (if it was her) also left (intending to meet her later perhaps?), and it was Eddowes who led Lizzie Williams through one of the three entrances into Mitre Square; two were narrow foot passageways, the third was a slightly wider carriageway . The ill-lit square was darkest in the southern corner and it was here that Eddowes led her clients for sexual purposes. It was to that same corner that Catherine Eddowes brought Lizzie Williams.
    Perhaps for the price of yet another sovereign, Catherine Eddowes would have been persuaded to lie down on the ground in the corner, even though it was still wet from the rain the previous evening had brought. There, like Nichols and Chapman before her, she lay on her back unsuspectingly as she prepared to satisfy her ‘lesbian’ client.
    Lizzie Williams was a woman incensed beyond reason, and believed that the woman who now lay on the ground before her might, if she were allowed to live, wreck what was left of her marriage, steal her husband and provide him with the child he craved, which she could never do. She had spent many painful years agonizing over her failure as a woman, and the way in which her body had let her down. Now she would vent all the anger and bitterness she felt, where, she wrongly believed, it was so richly and justly deserved.
    It would have taken only a moment for Lizzie Williams to drop to her knees or crouch beside her victim, draw her knife and cut Eddowes’s throat across, taking her victim completely by surprise. Thus, mortally wounded, she was already dying before she knew what had happened.
    While there is no forensic evidence to confirm the order of events we think Catherine Eddowes’s apron was cut in half immediately after her throat was cut, and before the injuries to her face and body were inflicted. It is certain that Lizzie Williams laid her victim’s uterus and left kidney on the severed part of the apron, which she then used to carry them away, because it was later found in a Goulston Street doorway covered in blood and gore. The murderer pushed up the women’s skirts to her breasts, then opened her abdomen with a single stroke of a knife. She made another cut inside the body, removed a section of the victim’s intestines, and pushed them away from her so that they fell on the far side of the body. Then she cut away the uterus, and placed it on the torn part of the apron.
    But this time, perhaps more confident of her increasing skills with the knife, her fears of failure temporarily forgotten, Lizzie Williams had an afterthought – or perhaps it was all part of her plan. She inserted her hand once more into the cavity of the dead body. Feeling around under the breastbone of the corpse, her fingers touched a large, round rubbery shape. Satisfied that she had located her victim’s heart, she cut out the organ and placed that on the apron too.
    At some point during the attack, three small black buttons from a woman’s boots were lost, that Sergeant Jones later found in clotted blood by the victim’s neck. We know for certain that they were not from the victim’s boots because at the time of her death Eddowes was wearing men’s laced boots. Could they perhaps have been torn from the boots that Lizzie Williams was wearing? And the fourth tin button, and the thimble: did they belong to the victim – or her murderer?
    Lizzie Williams would almost certainly have known that a police constable passed through the square on his beat every 15 minutes, because her victim might well have told her, or Williams could have asked her, just to make sure. Working as quickly as the poor light allowed,